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Invictus2017

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  1. Rather, happiness is the result of flourishing. Or, put another way: If you want to survive best, you must be happy. If you want the best chance at happiness, flourish. From that, and human nature, it is possible to define "flourishing". (It should go without saying that "flourishing" doesn't mean doing specific things. A particular person might flourish doing things that another might find utterly intolerable. As always, specific conclusions require consideration of the specifics of a particular life.)
  2. And in this they are correct. Rand's point isn't that morality consists of acting for survival, it is that the possibility of surviving or not makes morality possible and necessary. But mere surviving isn't, in her conception, the sum of moral action. The survivalists are correct in that all actions must be directed at survival. However, life is a process, carried out in an uncertain world. The consideration of survival alone won't work in the face of that uncertainty, if for no other reason than human beings are not omniscient. Rather, to best carry on that process -- to best survive -- it is necessary to cultivate those things that allow one to cope with uncertainty. Furthermore, emotions are an inescapable part of being alive. A person can, however, choose whether those emotions motivate and reward survival action. The person concerned with survival will, necessarily, concern himself with emotional health. That dish of ice cream might, conceivably, take some small amount of time from one's life (but, in the face of life's uncertainty -- and in consideration of the fact that statistics do not apply to individuals -- this is really not a meaningful consideration), but the habit of giving one's self minor pleasures will certainly have a survival benefit. Similar arguments can be made concerning the "spiritual" and social values that are, apparently, unconnected to survival. The bottom line is that survival alone does not provide a proper guide to living. Rather, it is survival plus a consideration of the nature of the process that is human life that does. This is Rand's "life proper to a human being" and it is also the "flourishing" that people talk about.
  3. It's worth noting that longevity is not the Objectivist standard of value. Life is a process, one in which an organism's actions (ideally) all contribute to its continuing existence. This process, being goal directed, serves as both as end and means to its continued existence. A volitional being has the choice to make its actions contribute --or not -- to its continuing existence. The point of ethics is to make those actions contribute. However, nothing in the Objectivist ethics speaks to the duration of the process. To the contrary, Rand focused on the nature of the process, not its duration. One action is not more moral than another because it makes you live longer, it is because it supports the life appropriate to the sort of being you are. (I note that I am as guilty as any of the sloppiness that leads to this confusion.)
  4. I agree with the last sentence, but I think you're conflating different definitions of good. Happiness is experienced as good because that is part of its identity; happiness is good in exactly the same way that water is wet. But happiness is also good, in the moral sense, because it promotes survival. Mother nature did this on "purpose", so that early humans, with their poorly trained rational faculties, would have a ready guide to pro-survival action. So the fact that happiness is both kinds of good is no accident. With a bit more knowledge under our belts, we can make note of he relationship and thereby make it a virtue to seek happiness, and take advantage of what evolution has gifted us with. I believe that it is possible to have a conception of good and bad that is not rooted in pleasure/pain. Some intelligent species on another planet may arrive at their morality in a different way. But for humans, because pleasure and pain are tied to our survival, our morality must take them into account. That is not the same thing as saying that the moral good is that which is felt as good, or even that for a thing to be morally good it must be felt as good.
  5. I agree that this would be a moral choice. However, I disagree that individual survival would not support it. As human beings, feelings are our motivation and reward for action and, as such, gratifying them can be pro-survival. (Not always, of course.) In the example at hand, gaining enjoyment through eating ice cream, the analysis is simple: Pampering myself, so long as it doesn't have clearly determined negative consequences, makes my experience of living more positive and thereby improves my ability to handle my life. It is therefore pro-survival and I should do it when it doesn't conflict with other more pro-survival actions.
  6. I'd go further: Any choice is necessarily moral. Somewhere in a chooser is better/worse that motivates his choices. Without the ability to decide that one alternative is better than another, there is no "choice", only action. The morality may be very primitive, as in "pleasure/good", "pain/bad", and it may be wholly unconsidered, but it must be there.
  7. The primary choice is to live period. Objectivism demonstrates that, having made that choice, one should live rationally. That is, being rational is pro-survival. I'm reminded of a scene from Star Trek. Spock et al are in a shuttlecraft that's in a decaying orbit and about to burn up. They have some fuel, but not enough to do more than delay the inevitable. They can't call for help due to massive interference. Spock reaches over and flips a switch that dumps the rest of their fuel, which burns up, causing a massive flare. Those on the Enterprise spot it and beam them out of there in the nick of time. Later, McCoy twits Spock for being irrational. A naive interpretation of Objectivism might agree with McCoy. After all, the odds that the Enterprise was nearby were really small. Wouldn't saving the fuel for a few more moments of life be more rational? But Spock did make the rational choice -- choosing against a few moments where he might definitely live, but impotently and with the certain knowledge of impending death, for the possibility, however remote, of a long and well lived life. Objectivism's point is that the root choice is a simple binary choice: live, or let nature take its course. The rest of the Objectivist ethics is premised on the fact that one has made that choice. It is, however, important to keep in mind that the ethics is not a recipe for living. It is a set of principles that acquire life (so to speak) only when applied to an individual's existence. What this means in real life is that I don't sit down one day and say, "I've decided to live" and then become an Objectivist. Rather, I decide for whatever reason that I want to be "good", and Objectivism tells me what the good is and how I can be good according to that conception. Along the way, I discover that the foundation of being good is to choose to live. And not live in a purely biological sense, but as a human being. This latter is not, strictly speaking, a part of that primary choice. Rather, I start with bare physical survival and, going down the logic chain, discover that bare physical survival doesn't work without taking into account my own nature. In particular, it means taking into account my physical and mental capacities, including the emotional ones. This is necessary because that primary choice provides a logical grounding for Objectivism, but not a practical one. Nothing in "I choose to live" tells me how to balance the requirements of short and long term survival. But the logic chain tells me that, to promote my own survival, I must, among other things, learn to love -- not life itself -- but life as as a human being. (Rand's "man qua man".) Survival, for me, then becomes not mere physical survival, but survival as a human being. If I act for mere survival, I undercut that love of life, and likely actually work against my own survival. I doubt that the writer of that Star Trek episode was an Objectivist, but I do think that he understood that Spock's choice was fundamentally an emotional choice. So they had McCoy twit Spock for his emotionalism. And that Spock was also right in replying that, under the circumstances, that emotional choice was the logical thing to do. From an Objectivist perspective, Spock's choice was between ten minutes of mere physical survival and the possibility of an extended life worth living --- and to the person who loves life, that's a no-brainer. The choice, while ultimately grounded in emotion, was nevertheless a rational choice. There is no question that a person may imperfectly translate the binary choice to live into his actual life, meaning that, in some situations, his actions are pro-survival and, in others, not. But that doesn't affect whether he accepts, as a rational principle, that survival is his ultimate goal. As for the flourishing debate, I think that the proponents of flourishing as something distinct from survival need to consider that Star Trek episode. In particular, why Spock's action was moral from an Objectivist perspective. Yes, flourishing is important -- because it contributes to survival. And because it does, it can be given a definite meaning -- by considering how it contributes to survival.
  8. I generally do not like to use academic terms when discussing Objectivism, and this is an example of why. Consequentialism, as described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <https://plato.stanford.edu>, is a category of ethics in which (to simplify) the actual or intended consequences of an act determine its morality. In this sense, Objectivism is consequentialist -- survival (not flourishing) is the touchstone of morality. But later on that article explains that consequentialism is generally reserved for ethics that are in some sense utilitarian, which Objectivism is definitely not. This is true. The standard presentation of the Objectivist ethics applies in the context of a person who is capable of independent survival and living in a free society that is not in a state of emergency. Even if one could find a "shalt" in that presentation, it would not necessarily apply to a young child or to someone living in Russia or during a natural disaster. But that presentation doesn't really have "shalts". It merely tells you what is conducive to your survival, leaving it up to you to determine what specific actions to take in your particular circumstances. So, for example, eating is almost always pro-survival. But what if you're in the last days of a terminal illness? Food might even hasten your death! First, Objectivism is about survival, not flourishing. There is no requirement in Objectivism to live a flourishing life, whatever that means. (As near as I can tell, "flourishing" is like "pornography": "I know it when I see it." :)) But, yes, there is no moral imperative in Objectivism to survive. That is a pre-ethical choice. If you don't choose to survive, ethics doesn't apply to you and you're free to ignore all of Objectivism. But once you do choose to survive, morality requires you to --- act on your choice. That's all. Objectivism merely guides you in that action. So, yes, some individuals could conceivably choose a bohemian lifestyle over productivity. I can't imagine a situation where doing so would be moral -- more survival-promoting than the alternative -- but that doesn't mean there isn't one. There is no subjectivity here. Faced with the alternatives you outlined, an ethical person examines the facts and determines which alternative best promotes his survival. Odds are he'll find that productivity is the better choice and he'll take it. But if he should determine that "just getting by" is the better choice, he'll take that one instead. (But even then, he'll probably try to be really good at "just getting by". E.g., Hugh Axston flipping burgers.)
  9. I answered this in the paragraph immediately after the one you quoted; I said, When I do explain what I was originally charged with, it will be by posting the actual text of the police reports, along with an extensive annotation. I will not simply rebroadcast the original accusation -- even in the form of a statutory reference -- without providing the evidence that supports (or rather, doesn't support) that accusation. I don't commit libel -- and I'm not about to do what would amount to libeling myself.
  10. My first introduction to the misconduct of government agents and other authority figures occurred in my childhood: I was, among countless other abuses, imprisoned for the "crime" of trying to avoid the incessant bullying I was being subjected to. Being a science fiction reader, I dreamed of flying off in a space ship. Later, I learned how impracticable that was, at least for the foreseeable future. As a libertarian and even after I parted ways with libertarianism, I looked at the various libertarian attempts at creating a free society, motivated by the desire to spend my time among people who valued freedom. Those attempts all failed. For the most part, that had to do with the errors (to be charitable) of those involved, but there was also a real problem behind the failures: no place to put a free society. I won't go into all the reasons for not trying to put a free society within the borders of an existing country. Suffice to say, that such a society would have to choose between being a largely military society or compromising with the government that controls their land. Neither would be conducive to freedom. Space may someday be cheap enough to get to, but not yet. The oceans, far from land, are a possibility, but the oceans are an immensely hostile environment. The Seasteading Institute has looked at this but, frankly, they wimped out, deciding to further a project which allows at most a few hundred people (not enough, by far, for a real society) to live within sight of land -- and under the thumb of its government. And I won't even go into the political philosophy that motivates them.... Anyway, no one has yet proven or disproven that it is possible for a society to survive on the ocean. Absent the last quarter of my life, I probably would have left it at that, supposing that if someone who knew what they were doing was to try to put a free society on the ocean, they'd provide the necessary proof or disproof. I could live my life and wait for it; if it looked good, I could participate. What happened to me changed things entirely. Living in this country means an existence which could be ended at any time by my arrest. It means being cut off from many of the benefits of a modern society. Worse, though, is the psychological corrosion induced by living here. Moving won't help. Becoming an illegal immigrant elsewhere would not materially change my life. But no other country is likely to take me legally, at least not any country I would want to live in. What to do, become a hermit? Obviously not. I looked again at the idea of creating a free society somewhere and moving there. I really didn't like the idea of living on the ocean, given corrosive seawater, major storms, rogue waves, pirates...and government navies. But another alternative was brought to my attention: the stratosphere. I've done a lot of back of the envelope calculations and it seems doable. My baseline is a vehicle capable of carrying 10,000 people with 100 square meters per person for living space, agriculture, commerce, recreation, and so on. The habitat is, in essence, a large building (316 meters on a side, if square, and 25 meters high) carried by a superstructure 1600 meters in diameter, either a cylinder or a hemisphere, with a volume of 1 billion cubic meters. The superstructure contains around 8,000 balloons used to provide lift. It would be capable of floating at 24 km using hydrogen as the lift gas. (Helium is not an option, for a variety of reasons.) The stratosphere isn't exactly a benign environment. However, its dangers are more predictable and mitigatable than those of the oceans. There are government aircraft, but that's much less of a threat than government navies. I'm reasonably confident that building such a thing is within the ability of today's technology. Financing is likely to be a more difficult challenge. But there are three other important things. I'm sure that most Objectivists won't want to hear it, but there's an awful lot of hand-waving in the derivation of its principles. I'm persuaded that most of them are nevertheless correct, and that almost all of them can be proven correct, but it would be good if this were done explicitly, no hand-waving allowed. I have in mind something like a wiki, with each principle given a single page, providing a statement of the principle, its derivation and validation, evidence in support, examples, and explanations. Such a thing would provide an unshakable foundation for a free society. The second is a serious attempt at describing an Objectivism-based government. What little I've seen suggests that most Objectivists think it would look a lot like early American government was supposed to be, but I seriously doubt that it would. I think we can look at the American project and learn many lessons (positive: separation of powers, checks and balances, negative: the failures that have led America to where it is), but I don't think it is a good model for a future free society. The third is a serious attempt at describing an Objectivism-based society. By this I mean, what sort of social mechanisms ought to exist in such a society? Let me give a single example: Any sensible person should see that a society needs a safety net of some kind. Obviously, the government should not provide that safety net (but what about bankruptcy laws? that's a kind of safety net), but should there be an actual organization to deal with this, or should it be entirely ad hoc? I haven't touched on a whole lot of other issues, mostly to ensure that this post comes to an end. But I've sketched enough that I can hope that others will be motivated to put some thought into what I propose.
  11. As a matter of benevolence, I assume that I am being told the truth unless there is evidence to the contrary. I could tell you the statute I was convicted under. However, I can't tell you the details of the "crime", as I was never accused of actions that were a violation of that statute. In any case, I'm writing about myself, not the unfounded statements of government agents (and others). I have no intention of becoming a mouthpiece for those criminals. If I discuss details at all, it will be in the context of a complete explication of what happened, supported by publicly available documentary evidence. Until then, I will stick to giving just enough information to explain my motives and thinking. The founders assumed that anyone interpreting the constitution would take into account the founders' intentions in writing it. The supreme court didn't misconstrue the words of the commerce clause, it explicitly chose to take them out of context. There's nothing the founders could have done about that. Be that as it may, I'm reasonably sure that the founders didn't intend by that clause to regulate specific sorts of interstate commerce. The context of that clause was that, under the Articles of Confederacy, states manipulated interstate commerce to advantage themselves at the expense of other states. The founders' presumed intent was to give the federal government the authority to put a stop to such behavior. Trump lost the popular vote, his noise to the contrary notwithstanding. Moreover, the election results do not prove that Americans are rejecting the pre-Trump status quo. Americans want to "drain the swamp" -- throwing out corporatism so that individual can better batten off government largess. They want to secure the borders -- when all the evidence says that doing so is neither possible nor would have a real effect on the immigration non-problem. They want to lower taxes -- but not the benefits that the government pays for with those taxes. And don't get me started on the horrible mess that was American healthcare before Obamacare. Didnt Peikoff warn us --- in the 80's! -- of where the American health care system was heading? Obamacare is actually an exemplar of a very common phenomenon. First, the government meddles where it has no business being. That causes serious problems which, naturally, the government has to fix. Repeat ad nauseum -- until the whole thing becomes an unsupportable mess. Obamacare looks to be the penultimate stage of a government-induced collapse of the healthcare system. We can only hope that the government will learn its lesson and get out of the healthcare business entirely -- if our name is Pollyanna. They got ir wrong -- American is not so far gone that a would-be dictator could take over. Yet. Or when they act on bad philosophy, persuaded that evil is good. That is a more accurate description of what's going wrong in America. No there is not. Americans are doing exactly what they've been doing since FDR showed them the way....bleating and grunting for ever growing government handouts and protection. America cannot reverse course unless and until its people reject entitlements altogether, and decide that each person shall live by his own efforts or not at all. I am not seeking justice, though if it fell into my lap I wouldn't reject it. But I've already fought that fight and lost miserably. I will direct my efforts elsewhere.
  12. Forgive me if I'm being presumptuous, but... Based on what I've read of yours thus far, I have to say that I think you're a fantastic writer. Extraordinarily lucid. I hope you write your book someday. I'm in my 60's. I have symptoms that suggest some sort of heart disease. My circumstances do not permit me to seek health care. I'm not going to waste whatever time I have left on writing that book. Especially since doing so would likely do no more than entertain. The government will never admit its evil. At best a competent lawyer might convince it to admit to a "mistake". But the competent lawyers who actually care are swamped with cases worse than mine. They're unlikely to take my case, not so long as there are so many people illegally convicted who remain behind bars. While I'm competent to handle my case myself, my experience and the experience of others has persuaded me that doing so would be a waste of time. The courts simply do not want to hear from pro se petitioners, and are likely to -- as they did to me -- predetermine the outcome and not in the petitioner's favor. (Check out why Richard Posner retired from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.) There is a possible happy resolution, but it does not involve my trying to persuade Leviathan to not eat me....
  13. I grew up in a liberal Democratic home but, oddly, my mother was a science fiction reader with Heinlein in her collection. I became a libertarian, but later became disillusioned with libertarianism. In 1983, a co-worker introduced me to Ayn Rand via The Fountainhead and I quickly read everything I could find. I pretty much stopped reading Objectivist literature by the mid 90's; I had concluded that I was getting nothing further of value from it. In the 90's, I spent a lot of time talking to people online and offline, probing their responses to libertarian and Objectivist ideas and doing lots of debating. This persuaded me that, for the most part, I was wasting my time. To simplify: What passes for child rearing in America (and, I presume, elsewhere), is a form of abuse that causes most people to be literally unable to be rational about freedom. What they needed was not rational argument, but therapy. I wasn't willing to invest the effort, so I simply walked away from the persuasion game. All this time, I had bought the myth that America is a free country, founded on the principles of individual rights and limited government. But I got a rude awakening. In 2003, I was arrested for a crime I didn't commit. Too poor to hire my own lawyer, I was given a public defender. He pressured me to plead guilty to the crime but, naturally, I refused. So he and the prosecutor colluded to have me plead guilty to a different crime, one the prosecutor knew I hadn't committed and my lawyer should have known I hadn't committed. My lawyer came to me and told me that I had committed this different crime and I, being held without bail in a prison with no legal materials to review, had no choice but to take his word for it. So, I pleaded guilty. Except I didn't. To properly enter a plea, I had to have been correctly informed as to what it took to violate the law. But my lawyer had misinformed me about that. Moreover, I had to admit to actions that constituted a crime. But the actions I admitted to did not constitute a crime. Both lawyers had to know have known it, but both solemnly affirmed to the judge that there was nothing wrong with my plea. Eventually, I reached a prison where there were legal materials. I got the records of my case and discovered what had been done to me. I filed my habeas corpus petition. Two plus years later, I discovered that it had been denied. The judge had simply ignored the law and refused to hear my side of the case. The appeals court and then the supreme court also refused to hear my case. I ended up spending nearly a decade in prison for a crime that I not only didn't commit, but which the government knew I hadn't committed. Having motivation and lots of spare time, I studied the law in detail. I learned that what happened to me was not a fluke, it is the way the system normally works. Innocence is no longer of relevance in America's legal system. The pursuit of justice has devolved into a mechanical process that acts on the presumption of guilt. Only those who have money, publicity, or the luck to draw honest and competent lawyers and/or judges can hope to see justice; the rest might as well resign themselves to a good screwing. During the course of my legal research, I stumbled on how things got this way. It all began in 1824, with a supreme court case, Gibbons v. Ogden. It's a seemingly unimportant case, a dispute over who -- the federal government or a state government -- had the authority to grant monopolies over the use of rivers. (A word of warning to anyone who wants to read the case: Unlike modern cases, whose text consists solely of the opinion of the court, the older supreme court cases are generally prefixed with arguments from the lawyers. Be sure that what you read is actually the court's opinion.) In reaching its conclusions, the supreme court said that, except in the case of an unresolvable ambiguity in the text of the constitution, courts were to construe the powers granted to the government using nothing but the words of the constitution as their guide. The courts were forbidden to examine the arguments and principles enunciated by those who wrote the constitution. If, for example, the constitution granted the government the right to regulate interstate commerce, then anything that could be construed as interstate commerce was up for regulation, and never mind whether the founder's had a different idea.. This is in sharp contrast to the supreme court's rulings on rights, in which the court has routinely ruled that the rights in the constitution must be limited by what those who put them in had intended. I read a lot more than this one case, of course, but theyonly served to reinforce what I had learned: In short, the supreme court abrogated the founders' intent to create a limited government, substituting instead the possibility -- since realized -- of a government of essentially unlimited power, with the "right" to constrain its "citizens" -- now actually subjects -- to serve its own needs. Released from prison, I was expected to be a good little slavey, subordinating my life to the desires of arbitrary government officials. Needless to say, I did nothing of the sort. I have twice now returned to court and what happened then has only reinforced my conclusions. I have now had five new appointed lawyers. All five agreed that I had been royally screwed when I was originally prosecuted. Three of them flatly refused to do anything about it. The other two said they would challenge the conviction, but managed to screw things up so thoroughly that they never even got to make the challenge. (I probably should mention here that I'm only describing the "high" points of my experience. A thorough description would require a book. A book that only the masochistic would read.) My examination of Americans and their government has persuaded me that the American experiment has failed. What was good about America has not entirely disappeared, but it continues to exist largely by inertia, aided by the Herculean efforts of those who do value limited government and individual rights. I give it perhaps 30 years before American has become either a dictatorship or an anarchy. The government has totally destroyed my life. Each time I was released from prison, it was under conditions that would have guaranteed my return to prison within a few months, regardless of what actions I took. So I walked away and am now, for the third time, a fugitive. (I do my netting via Tor proxies, BTW.) I own nothing to this government or to the society that has enacted and supports it. I do not support it, I reject its right to exist. Nor am I fool enough to try to change it, neither by persuasion nor by violence. All that is left to me is to leave it. But to where? That's for a later post.
  14. It would be hard to be an Objectivist -- or even a near-Objectivist -- and not see the costs, material and psychological, of living in the irrational societies that are the only existing ones. All other things being equal, only individual considerations would keep an Objectivist from moving to a place where the typical person was a fundamentally rational person. There are, aside from those individual considerations, three reasons why Objectivists don't pick up and leave. The most obvious one is that there is seemingly no place to go. The second is that proposed societies have generally been rather frontier-like, and Objectivists are reluctant to give up the benefits of Western society even in the face of their costs. The third is that the proposed societies have all been libertarian, not Objectivist, and poorly thought out as well. This is a topic that is near and dear to me, and one that I intend to write about. However, I think I'll start a separate topic for that.
  15. Very true. As I see it, there are four factors to consider when deciding whether to re-evaluate. 1) the importance of the conclusion to one's life, 2) the degree of confidence one has in the conclusion, 3) the nature of the evidence suggesting that re-evaluation is in order, and 4) the effort needed to do the re-evaluation. Suppose, for example, that I unknowingly misremember the location of a tree that was planted forty years ago, a tree that has long since been removed. A reliable person tells me that I have erred -- do I re-evaluate? There is some value in correcting even minor memory errors. Furthermore, I'm well aware that my memory of such details is fallible. The person is reliable, but his memory is also fallible . It would take some serious effort to discover who is right. So, I don't re-evaluate. If, however, I am presented with a picture, I immediately correct my error. There is a conclusion that has withstood testing by the scientific method. I have a high degree of confidence in the conclusion. On the other hand, as I'm not a scientist, I am not immediately concerned with the conclusion's truth. Along comes some scientific newbie who is "certain" that he has a refutation of this conclusion. Since it would cost me quite a bit of effort to evaluate the conclusion, I do not. I'm arguing with someone who insists that there is no such thing as existence. My conclusion is of supreme importance. But I know there is no possible counterargument -- were there, it would exist, thereby refuting itself. I do not re-evaluate. I'm arguing with someone who insists that the law of identity does (or does not) entail a wholly deterministic universe. Again, it's important. Moreover, I think the topic is worthy of consideration, not because I agree (or disagree) but because it's a tricky area where it's easy to go astray. But my opponent is an idiot, who rehashes arguments I've considered from many angles. There's no point in re-evaluating in this circumstance, as I am unlikely to escape any errors I previously made and my opponent isn't likely to provide any useful insight. OTOH, if I were a third my age and so hadn't much experience with the topic, even an idiot might accidentally stir up useful thought. I might well invest the effort in reconsidering my conclusions. "Certainty" is a measure of confidence, with "certain" being one extreme. There are very few conclusions where one can be so confident that no circumstances would justify re-evaluation. The axiomatic concepts are the only such conclusions that immediately come to mind. Everywhere else, the possibility of error lurks, so one should not be absolutely confident of one's conclusions. (And even with the axiomatic concepts, it is sometimes worth re-evaluating, not the concepts themselves, but what they mean.) But even a lack of absolute certainty is not sufficient cause to justify re-evaluating; there must be sufficient reason to do so and the benefit of doing so must outweigh the cost.
  16. I had intended to respond to the actual topic, but I see that it has strayed. Since I have a quick thought on certainty, I'll post that first, and later post on the topic. Why do we need the concept of certainty in the first place? To borrow a method from Rand: Imagine a being whose mental processes were so rapid that it could timely re-evaluate any conclusion it has reached when there was even a suggestion that the conclusion was wrong. Such a being would have no need of certainty; all of his conclusions could remain provisional, subject to re-evaluation at any time. What gives rise to the need for certainty is that human beings are not like this hypothetical robot; an attempt at constant re-evaluation would necessarily fail. Human beings need criteria by which they can decide when it is not necessary to re-evaluate their conclusions. Certainty is one such criterion. There is more to certainty than this, of course, but a consideration of the concept without reference to its function in human life isn't likely to be productive.
  17. I don't know of anyone who thinks this. Some people, but I don't know where you get most people. The issue is what people say responsibility is. Most would probably say responsibility is being altruistic or helping people for their own sake. Others don't seem to think at all, so those types turn more tribalistic. Early in my post, I distinguished what people call responsibility and real responsibility. Yes, most people believe in something they call responsibility but, as you note, it has little to do with responsibility in any real sense. So, even though most people claim to believe in responsibility, they do not believe in real responsibility. I get the "most people" by observation. Not of what people say about responsibility, but whether their actions are consistent with a belief in real responsibility. The typical American, for example, gives lip service to responsibility, but believes that the government should provide social security and health care. A sense of entitlement is a certain sign of a lack of belief in responsibility. One can see this lack of responsibility throughout Western culture, in everything from entitlements to the victim culture to the "I can't help it" in response to so-called addictions.
  18. Not really. They don't consciously realize that they're living a lie. This is one of the many fact that people repress, because the alternative is too painful. Accepting Objectivism would require confronting the fact that they're living a lie. Consciously, they do not understand her -- and it is a salf-induced failure to understand. However, subconsciously, they see the challenge to how they've chosen to live their lives.
  19. I'm a little late to this discussion, but I thought I'd add my two cents anyway. In most places, you hear much talk of "responsibility", which all too often means little more than doing as the neighbors expect. However, real responsibility consists of recognizing that one's future is within one's control and acting on that recognition. Unfortunately, most people are taught from infancy that real responsibility is impossible, that their future is largely out of their control, and that acting for their future is mostly hopeless. (Hence the proliferation of government programs intended to compensate for everyone's supposed fundamental incompetence.) A belief in one's fundamental incompetence affects every aspect of a person's mental functioning, to the point of being inseparable from it under ordinary circumstances. It becomes second nature, not to be acknowledged or analyzed, much less challenged. Along comes Objectivism, which says that every person IS fundamentally competent and that real responsibility IS a moral imperative. To the person who has absorbed the contrary view, Objectivism feels false. It calls into question the fundamentals of his life, his life's choices -- especially his abdication of those choices to others. But, fundamentally, it tells him that he has been and still is BAD. Some people -- the young, those committed to intellectual honesty -- can face what they see as an accusation of evil and consider whether that accusation is true and what, if anything, to do in response to it. But most people will not. Instead, they will engage in rationalizing -- which they see as reasoning -- to justify their life's choices and their beliefs. Worse, they don't even see it as rationalizing; it's what they've been taught as reasoning. In the end they persuade themselves that the fault is in Objectivism, not in themselves. (This is rarely intentional evil. Most people with those beliefs have had them since early childhood; they had no real opportunity to see their falsehood. Part of their programming is a subversion of their rational faculty, which keeps them from seeing their errors, and which allows them to use rationalization in place of reasoning and not see that this is what they are doing.) People who have been taught to believe in their fundamental incompetence live with fear and guilt. But no one can survive that way for very long. It is a psychological necessity to bury those feelings -- and the awareness that causes them. This necessity empowers and underpins their entire belief system, and also gives seeming strength to the rationalizations that keep out challenges to their beliefs. The ultimate reason that Objectivism is unpopular isn't its intellectual content per se. It is the fear and guilt that it stirs up in most people. Objectivism isn't, in their view, merely a mistaken philosophy, it is an EVIL philosophy, one that declares that they're living a lie, one which stirs up truly painful feelings. Rather than face reality, they put the blame on Objectivism. Objectivism's unpopularity is simply another version of blaming the messenger.
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